I feel like this is the same problem that drove Intel into their current position; they do a really bad job at creating a separation of concerns. Their big turn around plan across the business appears to be treating foundry and chip design like two fully separate entities, so that the foundry will no longer cater to their designers and actually force design to compete on their own merits; a hard-learned lesson.

And yet, here they are functionally subsidizing their CPU business by handicapping the usefulness of their GPU line. That handicap will probably be for at least two generations, since it's almost certain that consumers will now be skeptical of their (already rough) firmware being able to receive updates not only this time around but whenever their next line comes out as well, even if they claim to fix the issue.

Edit: Ars has retracted this story; Intel claims, and Ars has confirmed on Windows at least, that Arc GPU firmware should be upgradable using both AMD and Intel CPUs. Maybe they actually have learned!